Who Saw Him Die? by Sheila Radley Read Free Book Online

as she saw what the box contained she had performed the required ritual: expressed her surprise and pleasure, kissed her mother’s cool cheek, and then, bracing herself to hide her fear of her irascible father, had gone to his study to give her dutiful thanks to him …
    But that had been a very long time ago. Now she could savour the pleasure of anticipation, secure in the knowledge that there would be no anti-climax. With Cuthbert unexpectedly dead she was, for the first time in fifty-four years, completely free.
    Free to leave Tower House: she had always hated it for its ugliness, its coldness, its gloom, above all for the unhappiness it had contained.
    Free to leave Breckham Market: she had never liked the town because of the weight of all the family associations, the long memories of the older inhabitants. She would have moved to Saintsbury years ago, after her widowed mother’s death, but for the duty of looking after her brother. As a child she had given all her love to the small boy she had called Cub, and he to her. Cub had never learned to protect himself from their parents, and so she had done her best to shield him. At times she had even taken the blame, and the punishment, for his misdemeanours. When he grew into difficult, unstable manhood her love had waned, but her sense of duty had remained strong. To remove him from his familiar surroundings would, she knew, have disoriented him completely.
    It would also, of course, have spoiled what she had of a life of her own. Eunice had no close friends, but many valued acquaintances living in and near Saintsbury; and she had her absorbing voluntary work there as a vice president of the county branch of the Red Cross society and the organiser of its local centre. She intended to keep her social life immaculate, and this would have been impossible with Cuthbert wandering drunkenly in her vicinity, physically as well as mentally lost. And in the larger, busier town, the police would have been less tolerant than they were in Breckham Market. Better, she had concluded, to go on living with her brother at Tower House, but to put herself at a discreet distance by spending most of her time well out of his way in Saintsbury.
    But now, suddenly, she was free to leave. She had thought at first that she might simply pack a trunk, lock the house up, and take a room at the Angel Hotel in Saintsbury while she settled her affairs. But Victoria Road was no longer the most select part of Breckham Market, and her solicitor had advised her against leaving Tower House empty and at the mercy of vandals. Both he and her estate agent – she had instructed the senior partner of the most reputable firm of auctioneers and valuers in the town to handle the sale for her – had advised her not to expect the property to sell quickly.
    Eunice Bell was neither surprised nor disappointed by their advice. The estate agent had of course been positive, using the tactful adjective ‘substantial’ to describe the unattractive property and asserting that it would be eminently suitable for conversion to flats, or offices, or an old people’s home, subject to planning approval. But Eunice, hating every aspect of the house, found it difficult to imagine that anyone would be prepared to buy it at the price she was determined to ask. She had investments that provided her with a comfortable private income, but she knew that the type of property she proposed to buy (one of Saintsbury’s Georgian town houses that she could set about modernising with taste and discretion) would take all the capital she could raise from the sale.
    And so she prepared herself for a long wait. There was, anyway, a good deal to do before Tower House could be sold: the unused rooms to be opened, the heavy furniture to be unswathed from its dustsheets and sent for auction, the family effects to be sorted. It was not a task that she relished. In fact she had been avoiding it – but then, everything had